The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. Her descriptions are utterly serene in their use of language to penetrate right to heart of a person or a landscape. If Sleepless Nights is a mosaic, each tile is a perfect prose poem that captures the essence of existence in like the best of poets. In a montage investigation of the ‘I’, Hardwick reveals that the self cannot be separated from the places and people that color their days, and that one person is in fact the collision of many others all believing in their self-isolation as they move from cradle to grave in the beautifully tragic story of what it is to be human, all delivered through an impressive blending of fact and fiction.Īlas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.Įlizabeth Hardwick steals my heart with every page, every perfect poetic sentence. ‘ If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember, writes Hardwick, ‘ make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself.’ There is a truth in every fiction, and fiction in every truth.
Often paralleling her own life (‘a well-traveled and intensely insightful writer and teacher from Kentucky who married for a time with poet Robert Lowell’ may suffice as a brief biography for the uninitiated), Sleepless Nights takes dozens of brief reflections across the narrator’s timeline spent loving, losing and living to create a poetic mosaic of a life, wielding ‘fiction’ like a box of crayons to color in the black outlines of memory. Elizabeth Hardwick’s astounding ‘novel’-or should modern times brand it with the now-popular ‘creative non-fiction’ label- Sleepless Nights is a brilliant blending of fact and fiction that assesses the ‘I’ at the heart of her story as it harnesses memory into language, language that blossoms and blooms on the page like the most gorgeous of gardens. Memory is a sly kitten, darting to and fro through the living room of our mind, appearing in flashes here then there, never in an orderly fashion and rarely giving us a perfect still-frame to assess all the details. Italo Calvino in an interview with The Paris Review Elizabeth Hardwick’s astounding ‘novel’-or should modern times brand it with the now-popular ‘creative non-fiction’ label- Sleepless Nights is a brilliant blending Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
Italo Calvino in an interview with The Paris Review Memory is a sly kitten, darting to and fro through the living room of our mind, appearing in flashes here then there, never in an orderly fashion and rarely giving us a perfect still-frame to assess all the details. Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
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